Recognized as a leading CRM platform by reputable research firms such as Forrester, Gartner, IDC, and others, Salesforce holds a significant market share across many specialized vertical markets, including healthcare. Salesforce’s popularity in healthcare can be largely attributed to its robust functionality, enabling healthcare organizations to optimize various aspects of patient care, including those related to the organization and delivery of care.
In this article, experts from Itransition, a Salesforce consulting provider, highlight how using Salesforce for healthcare can streamline patient care coordination in your organization.
Streamlining patient care needs assessment
Conducting initial and ongoing assessments of patients’ physical and psychological needs is a core responsibility for care managers, which enables the effective organization and management of medical interventions across various healthcare providers and facilities. To assess patient needs accurately, care managers can require a wide array of data, ranging from medical histories and lab results to patient demographic details and social determinants of health. As this data is often scattered across multiple systems (EHRs, lab systems, case management systems, etc.), care managers have to retrieve it manually, which leads to care delays, negatively impacting patient health and satisfaction.
Salesforce helps remove this bottleneck. The platform can automatically consolidate clinical and non-clinical patient data from various sources, therefore eliminating the need for manual data gathering. The platform can automatically create comprehensive patient profiles based on consolidated data to provide care managers with a 360° view of each person and their needs, contributing to the accuracy of care coordination decisions.
Enhancing care plan development
Even with all the necessary data available, developing personalized care plans can be a highly complex and effort-intensive task for care managers. After identifying patient health risks and defining what support is needed, care managers must carefully prioritize and plan all the required actions and interventions. Care managers also have to document care plans, including all relevant information such as specific care goals, needs, therapy schedules, medication details, and emergency contacts.
The use of Salesforce can streamline traditional care-plan development workflows. Machine learning capabilities within the platform help analyze information from the patient’s profile to generate a unified health score. Based on this score, the platform also provides care plan recommendations and suggests actions that would be most beneficial for an individual, such as enrolling patients in wellness programs or recommending appropriate clinical interventions. Care managers can use this information to build actionable care and treatment plans.
Additionally, Salesforce enables organizations to create standardized care plan templates for common health conditions and care scenarios.
Rather than building and documenting new plans from scratch for each patient, care managers can tailor pre-made templates to the unique goals and needs of each individual patient, which helps free up clinicians’ time by reducing paperwork, allowing them to serve more patients without compromising care quality.
Optimizing medical benefits verification
Salesforce also enables care professionals to quickly verify patients’ insurance coverage before they receive medical care. This helps accurately determine patients’ financial obligations and eligibility for medical services, which can be useful for preventing insurance claim denials.
Organizations can configure connections between Salesforce and third-party insurance databases and create automatic workflows to enable the platform to verify patient eligibility and insurance coverage without manual intervention. For example, the verification workflow can run automatically whenever a patient record is created or updated. Salesforce can also automatically generate a patient insurance summary, which includes coverage, deductibles, and other critical data, and display it for care managers directly on the patient’s account page in the CRM, thereby significantly simplifying the benefits verification process.
Streamlining medication management and review
Ensuring that patients receive the necessary medical prescriptions and that they take their medications correctly is another challenging task for care managers, which can be optimized with the help of Salesforce. More specifically, professionals can record all medications the patient is currently taking, both prescription and over-the-counter, directly in the Salesforce patient profile.
For these medications, care managers can add recommendations and notes, including details like dosage, frequency, and prescription dates, to guide other healthcare specialists working with the same patient.
If a healthcare organization has a patient portal built with Health Cloud and Experience Cloud, it can also enable patients to see lists of their medications together with recommendations, which can improve their adherence to medical treatment and prevent medication errors.
As all information related to medication, along with other medical data associated with the patient, can be accessible via patient profiles, healthcare specialists can conduct more efficient medication reviews, allowing them to identify potential medication issues in a timely manner or identify unnecessary or redundant treatments. If there is a need to adjust medical treatment, specialists can utilize Salesforce’s functionality to modify existing medication entries or add new recommendations. Any changes or updates to the medication list can be automatically reported to patients and all of their doctors via various communication channels, such as patient portals, email, or SMS.
Simplifying care plan monitoring and tracking
Among other things, the Salesforce platform can be used for monitoring and tracking the execution of patient care plans, as its built-in tools can provide real-time visibility into a wide range of their clinical and non-clinical metrics collected through electronic health records, patients’ wearables, and other sources. For example, professionals can track changes across health metrics, such as blood pressure, weight, or heart rate, to understand how they change in response to treatment. They can also easily track what percentage of goals that were initially defined in a patient’s care plan are successfully achieved, as the relevant graphs are built directly into the patient’s account page.
The platform can also integrate with patients’ wearable devices and automatically analyze physiological and behavioral data in real time to identify trends that may indicate patients’ future health outcomes. For example, algorithms can identify patients who are not adhering to their treatment regimen and whose plans are unlikely to be completed on time, or those who are at risk of developing a particular disease. With this information, professionals can intervene proactively, offering patients targeted treatment strategies in a timely manner, reminding them to take medications, or adjusting care plans.
Final thoughts
Patient care coordination involves many complex tasks, which can be overwhelming and time-consuming. Reliable CRM technology, such as Salesforce, enables organizations to optimize care needs assessment, care plan development, and other associated processes, ensuring that patients receive timely and relevant support that contributes to their health and well-being.
A third-party Salesforce consultant can help your organization implement this CRM platform and ensure you make full and effective use of the platform’s capabilities to streamline care coordination. Such a partner can help you select relevant Salesforce apps, customize them to your needs, and integrate them seamlessly into your day-to-day coordination workflows.
